Empeg Mailing Lists

What you will find here are the mailing lists which receive posts from the
web based lists you can find on the the
Unofficial Empeg BBS

Why?

While the BBS had interesting discusssions in its forums, I found the
interface dead slow and inefficient. A mailing list is meant to end up in my
mailbox where my threaded mail reader can deal with it, not a web site where you
have to click and wait for every single message.

But there is already a mailing list, why new ones?

True, but it has never really caught on. The fact that it's on a commercial
list server might have something to do with it, but I think the main reason is
that the BBS had enough momentum that discussions never switched to the
mailing list.
Of course, the fact there were links to the BBS everywhere, and pretty much
no links whatsoever to the original mailing list didn't help.

So what are you offering?

I wrote a perl script that takes the botched digests that the BBS can send
you and splits it into Emails that are fed to the matching mailing lists that I
created on my machine. Note that this is one way only, I have no way to send
answers on the lists to the BBS.
You get to choose whether you want spend the time to log on to the BBS and
post your answer there, or only send it to the people who are subscribed to
the list.

The threads in the archive/my feed are all broken

I know, but there's nothing I can do about it, the digest contain hardly
any information at all, and no thread info at all. The digests seem to be
purposely crippled to prevent what I did with my perl script.

The archives aren't complete

If you have saved all the digest since the beginning of the BBS, please send
me Email so that I can
feed your digests in my archives.

Why do I get nothing all day and then all the messages at once?

That's because I'm splitting and redistributing a daily digest

Why do some messages not look right?

The digests contain all kinds of weird HTML things that I try to parse
and replace with text equivalents. I'm fixing most of the problems,
but it probably isn't 100% perfect and can't really be.
If you're curious, look at the substitutions I need
to do on those digests.

I want to do the same on my machine/How does it work?

If you'd like to do the same thing I did, you can get the
script I wrote

Wny are you doing this? What are you getting in return?

More load on my machine
More seriously, if people use the mailing list, it will be populated with
real Emails for everyone, and we'll have threads (In-Reply-To: header), whereas
I can't reconstruct threads that came from the BBS.
However the biggest reason for doing this is that I want the empeg traffic to
go to my mailbox, I don't have time to click around on a web site.
While I'm somewhat hoping that some people will switch from the BBS to the
mailing lists and allow for real discussions with real threads, that's just
me, subscribers ultimately decide what they prefer.

Why are some Emails addresses visible and some other ones not?

I captured the Email addresses I could find on the BBS on March 27th
2000. If you have an account on the BBS and you'd like your Email to be visible
to the mailing list subscribers, drop me an
Email

The lists can be found here:Mailman mailing lists
(you can browse the list archives too, that's an option you get after selecting
one of the lists (you don't need to subscribe to view them))

2000/03/27 (23:56): Version 1.0
2000/03/28 (17:14): Version 1.1. Added FAQ item and changed page title
2000/05/17 (23:30): Version 1.2. Added more info
2000/07/03 (16:23): Version 1.3. Updated the perl script with many new Emails,
coping with the bad date format of the new digests, and added 3 new lists